


Dedmore Fish

by Agents_R_Us



Series: Morse Code: A Year [5]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Anti Deke, Gen, Mild Language, Rubik's Cubes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-26
Updated: 2018-01-26
Packaged: 2019-03-10 05:27:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13495830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Agents_R_Us/pseuds/Agents_R_Us
Summary: So this was pretty dense... next week's is lighter (promise) and probably makes more sense. Plus... Bobbi!





	Dedmore Fish

“Could you do me a favor?”

Plastering her face with something she hopes reads “ _definitely NOT annoyed_ ,” in the most sarcastic way possible, Daisy looks up her computer. As always, Deke stands a little too close for comfort. He’s equipped with his trademark smirk and leather jacket, rocking on the balls of his heels. She can’t see his hands—they’re behind his back—but whatever he’s holding emits a familiar noise, like plastic gears grinding together.

Deke, apparently, is some kind of perpetually uninspired computer genius; though, according to their boss, the “genius” bit is the only part that matters. He’s the kind of person who’ll finish a day’s work in an hour and spend the rest of the day playing Minecraft or wring mediocre self-inserts on the company Wi-Fi.

She doesn’t blame herself for not wanting to help him. Aside from the non-existent work ethic, his all-for-one attitude has always rubbed her the wrong way. He’s the kind of person who you shouldn’t necessarily trust, and Daisy’s made it her mission to stay as far away from him as possible. Not that it’s helped; he injects himself into her life whenever possible. Today, he’s shoving a Rubik’s cube into her hands.

Flippant as ever, he walks away, shouting, “Thanks!” over his shoulder.

Honestly, he sets her blood to boiling—not even letting her answer, for a fucking _toy_ —but he’s also Gonzalez’s favorite, and up for a promotion that’d make him her boss. Meaning she has to do whatever he wants, within reason.

“Useless cunt,” mutters Daisy, turning over the cube in her hands. It’s nearly identical to the one she plays with when she’s bored, which must be how Deke figured she knows her stuff.

Slowly, she starts to slove it, thinking instead of doing what she really wants, which is punching her hand into a wall.

 

She got her first cube for Christmas in 2003. Technically, it wasn’t an official “Rubik’s” cube, having been bought by May at the dollar store on Christmas Eve, along with about twenty other stocking stuffers. At the time, she’d been too young to care, and the fragmented pictures of snowmen and stockings were prettier, in her mind.

Daisy, thinking it was pretty and seeing her older brothers’ cubes remain unsolved for years, immediately vowed not to “mess it up.” So, of course, it was instantly wrestled out of her hands and, as she’d thought, wholly _ruined_ by a young Piper. It took Coulson a solid hour to convince her murder was not a feasible response, and even then she spent a week staring daggers at her sister over the dinner table.

That night, she looked up “How to solve a Rubik’s Cube,” on her new computer, failed to solve the thing _at least_ four times, and, around midnight, passed out at her desk. The next day, she woke up and tried again.

It took another six months of practice, and more than a few Google searches, for it to happen. She solved the cube.

And, immediately, running off either heightened hubris or the purest stupidity, Daisy shuffled her cube and tried to do it again. Again, everything went perfectly… until she reached Dedmore Fish: the one algorithm she couldn’t perform.

Daisy didn’t know why that was (she’d managed to memorize everything else), or how it might be corrected, so she re-scrambled her cube and went at it again. And this time it was solved, just as painlessly as before.

It came to be that Daisy went at most things like that. When she reached an impasse, it was easier to double back and circumvent it than to barrel forward, unprepared.

It’s part of the reason why she’s so good at hacking; if she sees a problem, she immediately turns to find a way around it. So far, even outside of work, Daisy’s been able to work her way around most things. Anxieties are avoided; misgivings are smoothed over; tensions are ignored.

She knows, realistically, that never outright _dealing_ with her problems may not be the best way to handle them. But she also knows that it’s far less taxing to dance around her issues rather than it is to fight them, and she sure as hell doesn’t have enough energy to win that fight.

But there’s a cost, and it grows exponentially, a function of time. As times presses on, the issues start to pile up, and eventually, Daisy can’t dance around them all. Something slips.

It’s happened twice before: once in high school and once in college. Daisy got close again, last year, but work picked up around time, so she didn’t have the time for personal issues. (In truth, she’s been waiting for things to slow down and the other shoe to drop ever since.)

She’s never even learned how to solve the Dedmore Fish.

 

Now, the two, individual, incorrectly oriented squares mock her gross ineptitude. She still wants to put her hand through a wall, it’s true, but now she doesn’t think she’d have the energy.

Setting the cube down on her desk, Daisy sits back and rubs her eyes in exhaustion. She’d gotten over the flu weeks ago, but hadn’t had the time to catch up on her sleep. It’s exceptionally odd for her to realize she’s only gotten twelve hours over the past three or four days when she used to need that much a night, just to get out of bed in the morning.

Daisy checks the clock in the bottom right corner of her computer screen. She has to blink twice to make the numbers focus. It’s eleven past twelve, the last Friday in January, and already eighty degrees outside. Most of her coworkers finished their work hours ago and were planning on leaving after lunch. Daisy thinks she will, too, if only to go home and collapse onto the couch.

She stares at her lap. The room where she works is dark, with two lines of desks running on either side and a small lamp illuminating the few that remain occupied. Most people are already gone, she realizes, still not moving.

Every part of her body aches with a dull, ghostly kind of exhaustion. A string of bad days is lining up behind her, so long that Daisy’s starting to think something _else_ is wrong. But she’s too tired to be afraid, too afraid to be anticipant.

Sometime later—she doesn’t know how long—Bobbi calls her.

“Hey, babe,” she says, so happy that Daisy can almost see the smile she must be wearing. The rest of her words get drowned under the buzzing in Daisy’s head, but she manages to piece together enough to realize she’s agreed to meet a group of their friends at a bar.

“Yeah, I’ll meet you there… Yeah, I’m fine… God, you don’t know how much I need this,” she lies.

Eventually, she gathers enough energy to leave, chucking Deke’s Rubik’s cube onto his desk and wondering if she has a change of shoes in the car (she does).

While she drives, Daisy reminds herself she’s fine until she believes it, and walks into the bar feeling exponentially better.

(She’ll keep playing Dedmore Fish until she cracks.)

**Author's Note:**

> So this was pretty dense... next week's is lighter (promise) and probably makes more sense. Plus... Bobbi!


End file.
